Fujitsu Scansnap IX1500

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Fujitsu Scansnap IX1500	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	USB 3.1, WiFi	30	60	50 sheets	400 sheets	Click for more info

The Fujitsu Scansnap IX1500 is a wireless color duplex document scanner that can work standalone and is the improved successor of the Fujitsu ScanSnap IX500. It has a scanning speed of 30 pages per minute.

It has a generous 4.3″ touch screen LCD that you can use to set the scanning mode, destinations and allows you to setup basic scanning functions. Along with the USB connection which you find in all office products, it also has Wireless scanning through Wi-fi.

A little feature that the developers of the software put in is one that makes this desktop scanner able to scan an A3 document even though the scanner width is just for paper documents up to A4. Basically you fold it in half and then run it through the automatic feeder in duplex scan mode. The software will then stitch the two images together into an A3 digital image. Speaking of, the automatic document feeder ADF tray can hold 50 documents in it and to improve paper handling it has 3 slots on it for different paper sizes: one for documents, one for receipts and one for business cards, plastic cards or smaller receipts. It also has multifeed detection using an ultrasonic sensor.

For more fragile documents it has a manual scan option and we love the software because it offers dust detection and also streak reduction. The ScanSnap software ecosystem offers a lot of apps for document management, organizing your business cards, receipt management (The combination of a special guide on the document feeder and software makes it a quite useful receipt scanner) and scanning to smartphones and mobile devices be it Android or iOS. All the software is compatible with Mac and PC.

It has great Optical Character Recognition OCR software too because it bundles in the ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap app. With it you can convert scanned documents into searchable PDF files or Microsoft Office file formats with editable text, namely DOC, XLS and PPT. It is our choice for scanning text documents and books. Even if the scan quality is lower, it still manages to get a fairly decent text recognition accuracy.

This sheetfed document scanner can scan directly to the cloud storage platform of your choice to either Google Drive, Dropbox or Evernote. It is a document scanner for PC and Mac with drivers compatible with both operating systems (There is no TWAIN driver). We also like the Fujitsu because its software provides a really easy setup.

If you need a portable scanner version of this device from the same ecosystem, you can have a look at the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i.

Brother ADS-2700W

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Brother ADS-2700W	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	Fast Ethernet, Wireless and Hi-Speed USB 2.0	35	70	50 sheets	3,000 sheets	Click for more info

The Brother ADS-2700W wireless high-speed desktop scanner costs about 60$ less than the IX1500.

So what are the differences in the Brother ADS-2700W vs Fujitsu ScanSnap IX1500 comparison?

First, the Brother is faster with an auto document feeder ADF scan speed of 35 PPM compared to 30 PPM on the IX1500. The color touchscreen display is bigger on the IX1500 too. The ADS-2700W also has a gigabit ethernet port.

Another big difference is in the daily duty cycle for the Fujitsu IX1500 rated at just 400 pages per day while this model is rated at 3000 sheets per day. Honestly we don’t believe either of them. The IX1500 can surely do more that and we don’t believe the difference is that big.

The Wi-fi connection is better on the IX1500 as it uses 802.11AC rated at 1300 Mbps and this one has just 802.11N rated at 450 Mbps, so the IX1500 is 3 times faster.

This desktop document scanner has TWAIN drivers and also WIA, ICA and SANE support and the other one doesn’t have any of these. The advantage of TWAIN is that you can scan directly to any imaging app or photo editor because most support it.

They use different software and the basic conclusion is that we prefer the ScanSnap software which is always nicer to use.

This has an automatic document feeder that can stack up to 50 pages and it scans documents that are up to 196 inches in length according to Brother. We don’t really have that kind of long document in our digitization lab to test.

It has some integrated image optimization features like hole punch removal and background removal when scanning color documents. You can scan directly to a USB flash drive.

It uses the Nuance Paperport software to scan and you also get Presto PageManager together with the Brother iPrint&Scan app.

Brother ImageCenter ADS-2800W

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Brother ImageCenter ADS-2800W		A4 – 215.9 mm x 355.6 mm ( 8.5 in. x 14.0 in.)	Gigabit Ethernet, Hi-Speed USB 2.0 or Wifi	30PPM	60IPM	50 Sheets	3000 Sheets	Click for more info

The Brother Imagecenter ADS-2800W wireless document scanner is similar to the ADS-2700W but it has a few things extra which justify its larger price when you look closely at the technical details.

It can scan at 40 PPM versus 35, so not a big increase, but at 40 PPM it can be considered fast scanning.

The touchscreen is bigger at 3.7″ vs 2.8″. It is Kofax VRS certified but that doesn’t mean you get the software, it’s just a guarantee that it integrates perfectly with it.

There is also added security features, It has a scan feature that supports SFTP. The ADS-2700W only supports FTP. For post-processing it supports automatic deskew and has a 2-in-1 mode for scanning ledger documents.

The biggest addition is the ABBYY FineReader sprint which is a very powerful OCR software.

There is also a continuous scan mode to put all the pages that you just scanned into a single PDF, also known as multi-page scanning. They also put in the option to scan to printers and mobile printers. Both have the same Hi-Speed usb 2.0 port.

Are all these features worth the extra 130$ that you pay for the Brother Imagecenter ADS-2800w wireless document scanner? You decide.

Epson ES-500W

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Epson ES-500W	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and WiFi	35	70	50 sheets	4,000 sheets	Click for more info

The Epson workforce ES-500W wireless high-speed desktop document scanner is more in the price category of the IX1500 and ADS-2700W so it makes more sense to compare Fujitsu IX1500 vs Epson ES-500W.

It has a Dual CIS sensor with an optical resolution of 600 DPI. The device is also a wireless networkable scanner along with having a USB port. It has USB 3.0 which makes for faster data transfer speeds.

The daily duty cycle is bigger than on any of the document duplex scanners listed here at 4,000 sheets per day. The speed is mostly the same at 35 Pages per minute and it has the same 1-year limited warranty.

Epson also makes great flatbed scanners like the Epson Perfection V600 and Epson Perfection v550 which can nicely complement the document scanners that you already have. Or if you are on a budget, the Canon CanoScan models could also do just fine.

Which one to buy?

Our favorite scanner here is the IX1500 because it has the best balance between price and features that it offers.

In the Brother ADS-2700W vs Brother ADS-2800W war, we are not sure we would pay the extra for the OCR as you also get good OCR on the ADS-2700W.